Nights at the circus... Solveig Dommartin as Marion in Wings of Desire

The sad news has recently reached me of the death of the Franco-German actor Solveig Dommartin. She was struck down by a heart attack in Paris on January 11 at the obscenely young age of 45.

Her acting career began in the theatre in France and Germany. She then worked for a time as an assistant to the director Jacques Rozier (best known for his nouvelle-vague 1962 classic Adieu Philippine) before making her screen debut in Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire, in which she memorably played the part of the circus acrobat who ensnares the heart of an angel and causes his fall from grace amongst the black and white roofs and skies of Berlin.

Solveig had to learn circus acrobatics and all sorts of trapeze movements in under eight weeks for the film and never used a stunt double. For many people, it is still Wenders' most striking movie and she will ever be remembered for the part.

It was on the set of the film that she began a liaison with Wenders, which was to last several years and led to her co-writing 1991's Until the End of the World, a daring folly of a road movie in which a band of misfits, seekers, secret agents and femmes fatales roamed the globe in a search for the absolute, only to end up in the Australian desert.

Wenders said of the film: "Solveig Dommartin and I had written the story of the film together, and we thought that we only had the right to enter into such a sacred area as a person's dreams if we would bring something into the work that was sacred to ourselves."

The fascinating but flawed movie was heavily cut on its initial release, but also exists in different, longer forms that have been shown at festivals and the NFT, and still has absolutely entrancing moments.

Solveig only had a cameo appearance in Wenders' 1993 Wings sequel, Faraway, So Close and, apart from a role in Claire Denis' I Can't Sleep in 1994, her film career ended together with her relationship with the German director. She directed a 20-min short, Il suffirait d'un pont in 1998, starring Romane Bohringer and Catherine Frot, but had produced nothing since.

I met her for the first time at the Courmayeur Noir in Fest film and literary festival in Italy in December 1993; unlike the demure Marion of the Wenders film, the real-life Solveig was a veritable bundle of energy, a boisterous and extrovert young woman who was always the last to leave the hotel bar. She arrived at the festival straight from a Paris registry office where she had just married Fred, a French busker she'd only known for a few weeks, and promptly began flirting outrageously with most men present, under his bemused gaze.

But there was a basic, joyful innocence in Solveig and her medusa-like mane that quickly banished disapproval. It was thanks to her that my colleague Adrian Wootton managed to arrange a screening at the NFT of the five-or-so-hour version of Until the End of the World a year later, which she presented, with wide-eyed Fred still trailing in her rumbustious wake.

For filmgoers everywhere, she will always be the beauty who enticed an angel down from heaven, but for those of us who knew her, she will be remembered as a hell of a girl.